Today I am writing to say… I have not done anything creative to blog about, and I have NOT been practicing presence the past two days! (Which is why I haven’t done anything creative.) I want to, in theory, but I just haven’t done the work. And that’s why, I have to be honest, my days are finished and I feel like I did nothing. Because it’s true. I spent way too much time on the computer, not even doing anything substantial. I played Facebook games (which I’m becoming increasingly convinced are somehow related to the devil) and… and I don’t even know what! I can’t even tell you what I’ve done, it’s just meaningless crap that took up time during my day that I should have been doing something else. And now it’s 12:40 AM, I didn’t accomplish any of the things I wanted to do, and I should have been asleep at least an hour ago.

You know what I’m talking about. When you want something, and for a while it’s working for you, but then you realize that now you have to work for it. It’s easy to make a new “habit” and it lasts, what, a day? Sure, piece of cake. A week? Yeah, maybe. I realized at 1pm when I went on my lunch break that after 7 straight days in a row of writing in my gratitude journal before bed, I forgot last night. It slipped my mind. And blogging in here? That didn’t get done either.

It’s so easy to give up. It’s easy to say, “well, I didn’t stick to my goals… my plans… my New Year’s Resolutions… and now it’s over, I’m done.” The hard part, the important part, is to dust yourself off when you fall off the bandwagon, and instead of thinking “it left me behind, I’ll never catch up,” instead of that think, “I’ll hop the next one,” or better yet… “I’d actually like to walk.” Because walking is awesome!

Walking lets you set your own pace. Walking lets you take a rest, and pick it right back where you left off. Walking lets you enjoy the scenery. Look around, breathe in that fresh air, and take your time. Skip, if you want. And if you see a field, you can stray from the road and take a fun little detour for a while.

When you’re on the bandwagon, you’re kind of on autopilot. You’re just go-go-going. You stick with the road because that’s where everyone else is, so that must be where you’re supposed to be. And if you fall off, you’re left behind. Give up and you’ll never reach the end of the road. But there’s always walking. The tortoise might not always beat the hare, but I’m sure he enjoys the journey.

This was stream-of-consciousness, unedited, and keep in mind I’ve been up since 7:30am and now it’s just about 1am. But I hope that this pseudo-philosophical rambling makes sense, because it did as I was writing it. Now I’m off to bed… just let me grab my gratitude journal first. I have to write a few things down. And as for tomorrow, I think I need to Photoshop the word PRESENCE into a photo of a field of daisies and print it for my wall.

Image blatantly stolen from: http://www.wildherps.com/species/G.agassizii.html